MySpace Ramping Up Small-Business Features

MySpace is moving beyond personal and band profiles, and in fact, already has 3 million businesses, according to coverage by PaidContent of comments by Fox President and COO Peter Chernin at a CitiGroup conference in Phoenix.

Chernin said the business application will be ramped up by the end of this month. Currently, the site indirectly serves small businesses, which can hitch a ride on localized classified sections and in profiles. They are hard to find.

Despite the boast of such a large number of SMBs, MySpace is obviously behind Facebook in developing open aps that can be used by small business. But early-adopting Facebookers, and the larger population of 13 million advertising SMBs, aren’t tethered to one or the other and can easily add additional platforms, or move them entirely.

Besides focusing more on small business, MySpace is also set to add more local ad inventory via affinity groups for cars and other categories. What I’ve seen is that there is always untapped potential for classifieds in such groups (i.e., Corvette Owners of San Diego).